Valentine’s Day Gifts: Conversation heart cakes

If you’re like me, you’re a hopeless romantic and you love giving people gifts and making them feel special. These cakes are the perfect way to go, you can even take it up a notch and pair them with flowers, depending on who you’re giving them to and obviously what you want and are able to do.

These conversation heart cakes are just the cutest thing I’ve done in my life, they’re not too big, not too small and completely customizable, the cake, the frosting, text, everything.

I’m making these cakes for 12 friends (mainly because the boxes I got came in a pack of 12 and thought “why not use them all and make more people feel loved and special?”) so I’m making 12 cakes for Valenine’s Day but you can make how many you want or need.

Conversation Heart Cakes.

Ingredients/supplies:

Cake (you can use your own recipe, you can buy it, use boxed mix, literally anything you want. I used box mix and got 3 double layer cakes that fit in a 14.5cm x 14.5 x 9cm out of one single box of cake mix.)

Frosting (again, you can make your own, you can buy it, I made my own white chocolate buttercream, I’ll leave the recipe at the end, I used 2 batches for my 3 cakes.)

Food coloring of your choice

Heart template (I measured a piece of paper the size of my boxes and then drew a heart inside to make my template.)

Treat bags, boxes, cake stand, what you want to give the cakes in. (I used this boxes and I personally love them!)

Steps:

Bake your cake and have it completely cool.

Get your cakes and level them. I just ran a sharp serrated knife across the top to get rid of the humps (you can use a cake leveler if you have one, but it’s not a must) and cut your cakes in two layers if you need to.

Place your template on top of your cake and cut around it or you use a cookie cutter if you find one the size you need.

Chill your already-cut cakes while you get your frosting ready, I recommend warming it up a little so it’s not too thick. If it’s too thick and your cake crumbly, you might have a hard time frosting.

Fill your cakes if you’re doing layers. I did 2 layer cakes so I spooned some frosting on a cake heart, spread it out and then placed another heart on top. You could do more layers or just frost one cake if you like.

Time to crumb coat! A cake’s crumb coat is a small layer of frosting all around the cake to lock in the crumbs and get a nicer look when you do your final icing. Chill your cakes.

Up until now I used white frosting to fill and crumb coat my cakes, but since I wanted that ‘conversation heart’ look, I dyed my frosting a lovely shade of pink with Wilton’s icing color in PINK and then iced my cakes with a nice generous layer of frosting and smoothed. Now, this is where I spent the most time because the perfectionist in me didn’t want to stop until it was fully smooth, but it really doesn’t have to be. Chill your cakes after you frost them.

For the conversation part of your conversation heart cakes you could use whatever’s easiest for you, dye some frosting, use an icing pen, fondant, whatever you want. I melted some white chocolate and dyed it a deep pink with red food coloring I got at the grocery store, then placed it in a Ziploc bag, snipped off a small corner and piped my text*.

By now you’re done, just pack up your cakes or place them on your plate or cake stand.

*TIP: Mark your text with a toothpick so you can make sure it fits and it’s centered.

White Chocolate Buttercream.

Ingredients:

100g white chocolate

140g butter, room temperature

70g icing sugar

Steps:

Beat together your butter and icing sugar until light and fluffy.

Melt your white chocolate and allow it to cool slightly so it doesn’t melt the butter.

Mix it in with your butter and sugar.

That’s it… You’re done. The frosting is hardened when chilled and softened at room temperature.

And you are done!

If you recreate these cute Conversation Heart Cakes then make sure to tag us on Instagram so we can admire your creations!